Bluebird

1000 coats of turquoise

Maui wows for sure. Sand and sea and surf and turf chip my toe paint away each day. The girls have been tiki blessed, bead braided and tattoo henna'd, while I find myself inexplicably unable to drink anything but beer and rum. But the languid, lilting undertow of life is so enervating I don't know how anyone can live here full time. I'd never accomplish a thing. Almost as nice as a summer on the Michigan coast, it's too blissful for words.

March 23, 2012, 11:03 AM

Ancient Hawaiians Caught More By Fishing Less

By DOUGLAS M. MAIN

Getty ImagesA school of manini fish pass over a coral reef in Hanauma Bay in Honolulu.

Centuries ago, Hawaiians caught three times more fish annually than scientists generally consider to be sustainable in modern times — and maintained this level of harvest for more than 400 years, researchers report in a new study in the journal Fish and Fisheries.

The findings could be instructive for agencies that enforce fishing limits in overfished waters around the globe.

Native Hawaiians caught about 50 percent more fish than modern fleets catch today in both Hawaii and the Florida Keys, the two largest reef ecosystems in the United States, said a co-author of the study, Loren McClenachan, a fisheries researcher at Colby College in Waterville, Me.

Hawaiians harvested about 15 metric tons of fish per square kilometer of reef annually from 1400 to 1800, the study found. That’s five times the median harvest in island nations worldwide today.

Dr. McClenachan and her co-author, John Kittinger, a researcher at theCenter for Ocean Solutions in Monterey, Calif., drew on a variety of historical records and a method called catch reconstruction to estimate historical harvests in the Hawaiian Islands and the Florida Keys.

The Hawaiians used many techniques similar to those employed today, like temporary or permanent bans from fishing in certain areas, restrictions on certain species and gear, and catch limits. But they enforced the rules strictly; breaking them could mean corporal punishment or even death.

While the authors obviously don’t advocate such extremes, penalties in some areas could be stricter, the authors suggested, and enforcement could improve. In Hawaii today, “you get penalized much more harshly if you shoplift sunglasses from a store than if you take a bunch of fish that are the wrong size or kind,” Dr. Kittinger said in an interview.

Dirk Zeller, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia who was not involved in the study, said that the conclusion makes sense: Hawaiians were able to maintain such high levels because their fishing activities were so well managed and focused on a wide variety of different species, he said. They also left well enough alone, regularly outlawing fishing in spawning grounds and other areas to allow populations to regenerate, Dr. Zeller said.

The two places studied tell very different stories. As historians have documented, native Hawaiians employed a carefully controlled community-based system of regulations on fishing. Rules were passed down by oral tradition and recorded when missionaries introduced printing presses to the islands in the early 1800’s, Dr. Kittinger said.

In the Florida Keys, however, where intensive fishing didn’t take off until the mid-19th century, there have been fewer regulations and a repeating pattern of overfishing of one species for sale on global markets followed by a crash in that fish population and a switch to a new species. This cycle has severely depleted green turtles, sponges, sawfish and other creatures.

Now reefs in both places are overfished — “and there are less fish coming off the reef then back in the day,” Dr. Kittinger said.

Given that enforcement agencies are often underfinanced, he said, they might do better to devise a bottom-up approach. That is already happening in some areas, where officials have adopted co-management schemes with community groups that help draft rules and regulations.

Most productive reefs in long-ago Hawaii had community managers who knew a reef well and made rules unique to their own neck of the ocean, Dr. Kittinger noted.

The researchers reconstructed historical harvest levels by calculating the amount of fish consumption per capita necessary to maintain estimated population levels in Hawaii over the last 700 years. Dr. Kittinger said the results are conservative because he and his colleague used the low end of anthropologists’ population estimates in their calculations.

While some may question the use of such historical data, Daniel Pauly a researcher at the University of British Columbia, said that such information is probably just as accurate as current harvest estimates. One can estimate the catch of an isolated society like Hawaii by using population rates, which can be inferred quite reliably by anthropologists, said Dr. Pauly, who was not involved in the study.

Dr. Zeller suggested that the study shows “that we must learn from the past to save the future.”

If more marine reserves were established and limits were firmly imposed on fishing, he said, the fishing industry could actually catch more fish while making less of an effort.

But the blame should not be assigned solely to regulatory agencies, Dr. Pauly said. “We moderns cannot stomach restrictions on fishing that are necessary to maintain the stocks,” he said.

 

Speaking of Wall Street

The Geography of Occupying Wall Street (And Everywhere Else)

By NATE SILVER

October 17, 2011, 10:57 am

The nascent movement known as Occupy Wall Street had its largest single day of protests on Saturday. And a funny thing happened: most of the action was far from Wall Street itself.

No, I don’t mean at Zuccotti Park — which is not, technically, on Wall Street. Nor do I mean Times Square — all of 19 minutes away from Wall Street on the ‘C’ train — where large crowds of protesters gathered on Saturday.

Instead I mean Europe, where crowds in cities like Rome, Barcelona and Madrid were estimated at 200,000 to 500,000 per city (more, probably, than the protests in the United States combined). And I mean California and other parts of the western United States, where crowds were proportionately much larger than in the Northeast or elsewhere in the country.

Leaving aside Europe, where the Occupy protests merged, not always seamlessly, with those sponsored by left-wing groups, the distribution of protests throughout the United States may reveal something about the political orientation of the protesters.

The way that I studied this was to search through hundreds of local news accounts for credible estimates of the crowd sizes for each gathering. Where possible, I used estimates provided by reporters or public safety officials rather than the protesters themselves as they are less subject to exaggeration. In some cases, there were multiple estimates of the size of the protest in a given city — they ranged, for instance, from about 5,000 to 15,000 for the New York protests — in which case I used the median estimate.

This exercise is meant, in part, to provide a comparison to the crowds that gathered for the first widespread Tea Party protests on April 15, 2009, for which I adopted a similar approach and came up with an estimate of at least 300,000 protesters across the country.

Saturday’s Occupy protests were probably smaller than that. Over all, I was able to find estimates of crowd sizes in about 150 American cities, ranging from the thousands of the protesters that turned out in New York to the roughly 10 who turned out in Juneau, Alaska — or the one protester who represented the movement in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Nevertheless, based on the median estimates for the cities, I arrived at an overall total of about 70,000 protesters who were documented as having been active on Saturday throughout the United States.

This is very probably an underestimate — there were some protests that were noted in news accounts but without any firm estimates of crowd size. But I’m fairly certain that I captured most of the larger protests. The true overall figure might have been somewhere on the order of 100,000 protesters. That’s pretty big, but not as big as the largest day of Tea Party protests in 2009, nor other recent protests like the pro-immigration gatherings of 2006, which accounted for about 500,000 people in Los Angeles alone.

It should be cautioned that the comparisons are not quite apples to apples. Although Oct. 15 was a focal point for many protesters, the Occupy groups are far more decentralized than even the Tea Party movement and the extent to which a concerted effort was made to turn out a large crowd varied a lot from city to city. Some cities also had larger gatherings before the ones held on Saturday.

(People who want to see or expand upon the raw data can find it in an Excel spreadsheet here. Disclaimer: it is provided ‘as is’ and I am unlikely to do any further work on crowd-counting.)

Nevertheless, the data is in reasonable enough shape that we should be able to make some inferences about the types of cities in which the largest numbers of protesters were gathered. They tended to be in West.

Over all, about 38,000 protesters — more than half of the documented total — turned out in the Western Census Bureau Region, which accounts for about 23 percent of the country’s population. On a per-capita basis, the West drew about two-and-a-half times more protesters than the Northeast, four times more than the Midwest, and five times more than the South. And it wasn’t necessarily in large cities — although places like Los Angeles and Seattle had large crowds, so did the wine-and-cheese town of Santa Rosa, Calif., and the college town of Eugene, Ore., among others.

This could be due to a number of factors. Perhaps it has something to do with race, for instance. Cities where African-Americans make up a majority of the population, like Detroit, New Orleans and Cleveland, have tended to have underwhelming numbers of protesters and poorly organized Occupy groups. (There are plenty of those cities in the South, the Northeast and even the Midwest — but not really in the western United States).

Or maybe it has something to do with technology: Much of the organizational activity for the Occupy movement has taken place online, and the West Coast is particularly tech-savvy.

I suspect that more than anything, however, it reflects the politics of the protesters. Specifically, they tend to be more liberal than they are Democratic partisans. Take liberalism, subtract the Democratic Party, and the remainder might look something like Occupy Wall Street.

Oregon, for instance, which had among the highest per-capita rate of protesters on Saturday, has the fourth-highest fraction of self-identified liberals. But it also has a large number of independents — and its share of proud Republicans — so its partisan balance between Democrats and Republicans is fairly average.

By contrast, a state like West Virginia has a large number of Democrats but few liberals — and there were almost no accounts of protest activity there.

So perhaps the protesters are more ideologically minded than they are interested in partisan politics. In fact, they may be relatively disengaged from “politics as usual.” In a somewhat informal New York magazine survey of 100 protesters in Manhattan, only 39 percent reported having voted in the 2010 midterm elections.

All of this could create headaches for the Democratic Party — and for the protesters — if it tries to co-opt the Occupy movement.

Then again, there are some parallels between the Occupy protests and the Tea Party, which especially at first was more representative of a certain strand of conservatism than it was the Republican Party. The Tea Party has become somewhat unpopular now — but Americans had warmer views of it initially, something which is now true of the Occupy protests.

Perhaps it’s the lack of overt partisanship that people are responding favorably to.

Perhaps, even, ‘post-partisanship’ will emerge from the left and right of the country rather than from the center.

So far, despite Occupy Wall Street’s name, its energy seems to be coming from the left coast.

Hook’s 12- or 15-year-aged from Wisco beats any New York Cheddar

Cheese Questions, Answered

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Camembert from Normandy.

Five of Norbert’s favorite cheeses are below.

Norbert Wabnig, the owner of the Cheese Store of Beverly Hills, is answering readers’ questions on all things cheese. Post your questions in the comments section here.

Q.

I’ve had the pleasure of purchasing and eating delectable cheese from your shop on N. Beverly on my last trip to L.A. Incredible! Sometimes, though, I do get the baffling occasional craving for the iconic (and admittedly rubbery) slice of Kraft American Cheese.

What can you suggest to those that feel like slumming it to Vons (Stop-and-Shop for East Coasters), or for those on a tight budget? What do you find acceptable, and perhaps, even, good, in the dairy aisles of a supermarket? I’m secretly hoping you harbor guilty pleasures for Laughing Cow buttons and/or string cheese. — Jamie G., Westchester County, N.Y.

A.

Never be ashamed of liking any kind of cheese. What I might recommend is something that is available in almost any grocery store, and that is Jarlsberg. Thanks for coming by the store and don’t be a stranger. (P.S. I love the little, spreadable Bel Paese buttons.)

Q.

If you were selecting your five favorite cheeses for a cheese board, what would they be and why? — stephanieb, Los Angeles

A.

I truly have no five favorites, I love all of them, but I always try to put a goat, cow, sheep, one blue and something whimsical on a cheese plate. For example, a Basque sheep’s milk cheese, a fresh California chevre, a flavorful Camembert from Normandy, a Belgian Grevenbroecker Blue and Kokos from the Netherlands!

Q.

What would you recommend as the best crumbly strong Cheddar available on the East Coast in New York State? — Geraint Owen, N.Y.

A.

A great crumbly Cheddar is Hook’s 12- or 15-year-aged Cheddar from Wisconsin.

Q.

Which cheese goes best with white wine? Which cheese goes best with red wine? — Vanessa, Pennsylvania

A.

The rule to remember is there is no rule. If you like a goat cheese with a red wine, enjoy it.

They came, they barked, they surfed

Sit, stay, surf: Sea dogs hang 10 in Huntington Beach

Molly Godiva, a chocolate Lab, is among a couple of dozen dogs competing in the Surf City Surf Dog competition. She may be a novice on a board, but she's no rookie in canine athletics.

Hanzo the boxer rides a wave Sunday at the dog surfing competition in Huntington Beach. (Francine Orr, Los Angeles Times)

By Paloma Esquivel, Los Angeles Times

September 26, 2011

It was impossible to tell if Molly Godiva really had any interest in being champion surf dog. What was clear was that she was having a pretty good time Sunday, trying to drag her owners into the water and barking at any dog playing catch nearby.

"She's real quiet at home," her owner Tom Maioli said. "She's excited."

In just a few minutes the 8-year-old chocolate Lab would be competing for the first time at the Surf City Surf Dog competition in Huntington Beach, along with at least 22 other canines, including several seasoned competitors.

Photos: Sit, stay, surf

This is not to suggest Molly is a rookie athlete — just last week she took fourth place in a dock-diving competition, which qualifies her for a national competition that rates how far and how high salty dogs leap into the water, Maioli said. She was, in fact, recruited by local dog surfing aficionados after someone saw her diving.

Not surprisingly for California, dog surfing has its own community of fans and competitors in beach towns. During the summer, several competitions are held up and down the coast. And like some of the other dogs at Sunday's competition, Molly Godiva was invited to the Anaheim swimming pool of one of those aficionados to train for the big event.

Training, Maioli said, consists of putting the dog on a surf board on land to see how it reacts when the board starts wobbling. If that works out, then it's into the swimming pool and onto the board. Molly was a natural, her owner said.

All around Huntington's dog beach Sunday were Labradors and boxers, bulldogs and Jack Russell terriers — and just about every other breed, large and small — surrounded by competitors, spectators and a host of businesses set up to cater to them. One booth doled out samples of dog food on large soup spoons, and another sold LED-emblazoned collars. An enterprising Newport Beach company offered to prepare and deliver meals such as turkey and whole wheat macaroni, and fish and sweet potato with ingredients "approved for human consumption."

Competition started just before 10 a.m. Molly was in the first heat of extra large dogs with Sir Hollywood, an English bulldog, and Stanley, a Chesapeake Bay retriever. They had 30 to 40 minutes to show off their skills and were judged on a point system. The goal, of course, was to stay on the board and ride to shore. Doing that while standing on all fours was worth a lot more than doing it lying down. And doing it backward or managing to recover after almost falling off was rewarded with more points.

At the horn, Molly was the first in the water, but she struggled to get on a board. In the meantime, Sir Hollywood swam out quickly and made the first long ride of the day, floating calmly to shore. Sir Hollywood and Stanley soon caught several waves, while Molly struggled. But she finally got her footing and rode a small wave. A group of fans cheered and shouted her name as she made her way back into the water. In the end, she managed to ride three waves. But it wasn't quite enough to keep up with Sir Hollywood, who at one point rode backward, to the clear approval of the crowd.

Sir Hollywood took the top spot in the heat; Molly took third. But her owner was undeterred.

"She has real good balance," Maioli said. "We're happy.... And we'll be back."

San Francisco Nude-Ins

Protesters Bare All Over a Proposed San Francisco Law

By MALIA WOLLAN

Published: September 25, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO — Perhaps it should not be a surprise that San Francisco does not have a law against being naked in public, nor that a small, unselfconscious segment of the city’s residents regularly exercise that right.

 

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

A proposed law would put some restrictions on public nudity in San Francisco, and a “Nude-In” on Saturday became a tourist attraction. “This is about body acceptance, not politics,” the organizer said.

That tiny minority was joined this weekend in the autumn fog and cold by unclothed sympathizers at a “Nude-In.” One of their objectives was to draw attention to a proposed law — introduced by Scott Wiener, a city supervisor — that would prohibit nudity in restaurants and require unclad people to put a towel or other material down before sitting bare-bottomed on benches or other public seats.

Mr. Wiener said the law was introduced in response to an increase in nakedness in parks, streets and restaurants.

“It used to be that there would be one nude guy wandering around the neighborhood and no one thought twice about it,” said Mr. Wiener, who represents the city’s Castro district. “Now it’s a regular thing and much more obnoxious. We have guys sitting down naked in public without the common decency to put something down underneath them.”

Mr. Wiener’s effort was destined to grab headlines, but he probably did not anticipate that his legislation would inspire even more people to disrobe.

“Wiener might as well have shot lasers and fireworks into the sky announcing that public nudity is legal,” said George Davis, 65.

A self-described “urban nudist” who once ran for mayor and often campaigned in the buff, Mr. Davis now spends most afternoons lounging in his birthday suit in a public plaza in the Castro.

Putting a towel between your backside and a seat is “basic nudist etiquette,” said Mr. Davis, adding that the legislation requiring it was “totally unnecessary.”

Still, Mr. Davis said, the publicity about the proposed law could be credited for the new faces at the Nude-In, which was held Saturday at the Jane Warner Plaza in the Castro.

Other nearby cities like Berkeley and San Jose have passed laws prohibiting public nudity, but in San Francisco it remains legal. In accordance with state law, public nudity is only illegal when accompanied by “lewd thoughts or acts” or “where there are present other persons to be offended or annoyed.” But since state law prohibits police officers from being the offended party, it takes a citizen’s arrest— a rare occurrence in a city that prides itself on its open-mindedness and tolerance — to take a naked person into custody.

Many of the people who took part in the Nude-In said that they already used towels when they sat down, and that they thought Mr. Wiener’s legislation was pointless. The event itself was originally organized not as a protest but as a curtain-raiser for the Folsom Street Fair, which spread over 13 city blocks on Sunday. “This is about body acceptance, not politics,” said the Nude-In’s organizer, Mitch Hightower, 50, who runs a pornographic Web site.

Nowhere is brazen public nudity more evident than at the Folsom Street Fair, which is billed as the largest leather and fetish event in the world. The gathering attracts hundreds of thousands of people every year, many of them wearing black leather chaps and nothing else.

“In San Francisco, public nudity is a big part of a lot of social street events, and that’s a good thing,” Mr. Hightower said.

Businesses in the Castro are divided over the role that naked people play in the neighborhood’s economic and cultural appeal. Despite receiving some complaints about nudity from business owners, Steve Adams, president of the Merchants of Upper Market and Castro, says he often sees tourists posing for photographs with the nudists.

“Nudity really doesn’t impact business,” said Mr. Adams, whose group represents about 300 businesses. “In fact, it is kind of a draw for tourists. As long as the people who come to look spend money in the neighborhood, that’s all I care about.”

At the Nude-In, bystanders in sweaters and jackets circled the cluster of several dozen naked people, gawking and snapping photos with their smartphones. Two teenage girls posed with a man carrying a “Nude Is Not Lewd” sign and wearing nothing more than a white cowboy hat and a pair of worn leather boots.

“I brought my out-of-town guests here to show them an ‘only in San Francisco’ experience,” said Maggie Cahill, 53, a technology manager at a bank who stood scrunching her nose at the scene with friends from Los Angeles. “Where are the supermodel types?” she asked. “We want to know why it’s always the people who should not be naked who get naked.”

Some of the nudists at the rally seemed to already be adhering to the sought-after decorum by sitting on newspapers. In fact, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, one of the city’s weeklies, explicitly advertised its usefulness for just that purpose, printing a special clip-out page in last week’s issue. The page pointed out that newsprint was a 100 percent recyclable seat guard, and in bold type it said: “If you go bare, put ’er there.”

When the party favor's by Ruscha

Seeing Things | Getting Hubbied

Design

|

By BROOKE HODGE

| September 15, 2011, 12:49 pm

The wedding favors designed by Ed Ruscha were printed and die-cut at Aardvark Letterpress, a family-run press in Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park neighborhood.

Her last name means partner or husband, and her parents have married and divorced each other more than once. So it’s no surprise that the Los Angeles artist Bettina Hubby is fascinated with the institution of matrimony. “Marriage is a big topic for me,” she said. “I was married and so were my parents, several times, and I wondered why marriage hasn’t changed or evolved the way other things have changed.” In 2009 she initiated Get Hubbied, a multitiered art project to investigate the idea of marriage, which she describes as both fragile and resilient. Hubby and the artist and musician Tif Sigfrids, who have been working together for the last four years, conducted intensive research into all aspects of marriage and the rituals surrounding the wedding ceremony.

As a twist on the traditional bridal bouquet, Bettina Hubby designed two piñatas in the shapes of the bride and groom’s favorite flowers — a daisy and a daffodil — filled with pickup lines and flirting tips.

More than 30 artists were invited to address elements of what Hubby calls a joyous project, from the garter to the ceremonial throwing of the rice. “At first I wanted to do an exhibition, but then we became so engrossed with all things marriage-related that we knew the end result had to be an actual marriage,” Hubby said. In her search for a couple willing to engage directly in a wedding as art project, she placed an ad in Artforum magazine that urged, “Don’t Get Married, Get Hubbied,” and a flood of readers responded. After interviewing at least 25 serious applicants (whose videos are posted on the Get Hubbied Web site), Hubby and Sigfrids found their couple.

On Sept. 25, at the Center for the Arts in L.A.’s Eagle Rock neighborhood, Rebecca Ulrich and Ruben Diaz will tie the proverbial knot in a legally binding wedding ceremony. The artist Joe Sola, who was temporarily ordained so that he can officiate, has created a performance on the subject of relationships and marriage especially for the occasion. Ed Ruscha designed die-cut cards proclaiming “I Do: the world’s greatest catch phrase,” which guests will receive as favors; Joshua Callahan is decorating the couple’s car; Sigfrids will serve as official videographer; and Hubby herself designed the bouquet: two giant flower-shaped piñatas. And there will be an exhibition, after all. The artwork, ephemera and film from “Get Hubbied” will be exhibited for a month at the Center for the Arts, opening on Oct. 15.

Actually, he left his heart in Belvedere

Tony Bennett's seaside castle for sale

The ferry from SF's Embarcadero to Angel Island stops first in Tiburon, where passengers on the open air decks get a chance to stare in wonder (and envy and lust) at impossibly ornate mansions gracing the bay's hillside. On the very top, we might see a Spanish-y looking home, castle-like. Even without knowing whom this palatial abode belongs to, we know it's special.

Trulia Luxe Living

A property to make you croon...or swoon

And of course, we're right. That's Tony Bennett's place- at least until it sells. Because Mr. Bennett's Belvedere mansion just hit the market.

Trulia's new Luxe Living section devotes itself to real estate news of the celeb variety. It is from this fun (if voyeuristic) resource that we got these photos of the Bennett estate, which clearly boasts the kind of views to, yes, win your heart and keep it there forever... the kind of views someone might write a song about...

Trulia Luxe Living

 

The house itself is song worthy. If she were alive, Janis Joplin perhaps could ask if the Lord would buy her a 9,500 square foot, 6 bedroom, 8 bathroom mansion (with guest house, multiple terraces, and 7-car parking) in which she could make her amends. But the Lord would need to be faring these economic times better than most: The Bennett property is listed for $27,500,000.

Trulia Luxe Living

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/ontheblock/detail?entry_id=94604#ixzz1U53pAlyk

Yo-So-Mighty

Yosemite deaths highest in recent memory

August 2, 2011 | 11:34 am

 

2011 is shaping up to be the deadliest year in Yosemite in recent memory. A San Ramon woman who fell to her death Sunday from Half Dome was the 14th person to die in the national park this year.

Haley LaFlamme, 26, was descending the dome's rain-soaked granite face using mounted cables around noon Sunday when she slipped and fell 600 feet.

Yosemite typically sees five or six deaths by the end of July and 12 to 15 by the year’s end, said Kari Cobb, a spokeswoman for the park.

Interactive: Yosemite's four seasons

An influx of visitors could be contributing to the surge in fatalities. Last year, the park had more than 4 million visitors for the first time since 1996. This year could bring nearly as many.

“We've had more visitors, and a lot of people who come to Yosemite are coming from city situations,” Cobb said. “A lot of people who are coming to the park aren't familiar with nature and don't understand the implications of their actions.”

The park’s swollen rivers and streams may also be a factor.

Six of this year’s deaths have involved water, a greater hazard than in years past because the winter’s especially heavy snow pack has been melting, creating treacherous conditions in fast-moving waters.

Three hikers from a Modesto-area church group died last month after they climbed over a metal guardrail at the top of Vernal Falls and were swept over the edge of the 317-foot drop-off. Two hikers drowned in the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir on June 29, and a hiker slipped and fell into the Merced River on the Mist Trail on May 13.

Before Sunday, the last time someone died on Half Dome was in June 2009. Majoj Kumar, a software engineer also from San Ramon, fell to his death from while hiking along the cables in crowded conditions during rain and hail.

This Yosemite death count includes non-hiking fatalities from incidents like heart attacks, natural causes and motor vehicle accidents. Park officials do not have figures for before 2008, when nine deaths were recorded.

On Sunday, LaFlamme and three friends and family members were among about 400 hikers who had secured a permit to access the 400-foot-long cables that help visitors climb to the top during the busy summer season.

The park started requiring permits last summer because of concerns about overcrowding and a series of deaths near the top of the park’s iconic peak. Rain and lightning strikes can send crowds of people rushing down from the summit.

Park officials said LaFlamme was descending the dome during a severe thunderstorm that had dropped rain on the peak for several hours and left the granite surface wet and slick

Signs warn hikers not to climb the cables near the peak during rain and lightning. Although some hikers turned around there because of the weather, LaFlamme was one of about 20 people who remained, park officials said.

Four other people have perished since 2006 on the Half Dome hike, which is 8-1/2 miles one way and can take as long as 12 hours round-trip.

Restoring the view

Park service to thin out Yosemite's growing crowds -- of trees

Thousands of younger pines and cedars will be cut down this fall to restore many of the park's original scenic vistas that in previous decades were managed by natural and controlled fires.

By Julie Cart, Los Angeles Times

July 29, 2011, 7:22 p.m.

Reporting from Yosemite National Park -- National parks tend to be a tree hugger's paradise. Layers of federal laws, strict park service rules and even the disapproving scowls from some visitors prohibit so much as driving a nail into a tree, much less cutting one down.

But it's getting a bit crowded in Yosemite, where more than a hundred years of prompt firefighting have allowed towering pines and cedars to clog the park's meadows and valleys. These days, you can barely see the granite for the trees.

That's about to change. Yosemite National Park officials say thousands of trees will be felled to preserve the iconic views of the park's waterfalls and the craggy faces of El Capitan and Half Dome.

---

For the Record: This article incorrectly refers to Yosemite as the country's first national park. Yellowstone was the first national park.

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The project is part of Yosemite's Scenic Vista Management Plan, approved by the park service's regional office this week.

Photos: Four seasons in Yosemite

Chain saws will be fired up in the fall, said Supt. Don Neubacher, aimed mainly at ponderosa pines and incense cedars. Rare or ecologically sensitive trees such as California black oaks, sugar pines and white bark pines will be spared. None of the park's thousand-year-old sequoias will be cut, nor will any trees more than 130 years old.

In public meetings and in person, park officials and rangers have been making the case that their tree-cutting plan is biologically sound and aims to improve visitor enjoyment of the park's natural features. To that end, much of the thinning will be done along the park's roads and turnouts, where carloads of tourists pile out to snap pictures of Bridalveil or Yosemite falls.

Still, the public has let park officials know that there is something unseemly about the image of lumberjacks hewing mighty trees in the country's oldest national park.

Neubacher understands visitors' concerns about cutting trees in Yosemite, but says "this will create views for visitors, views that were here before."

Yosemite was set aside as the nation's first national park in part because of the magnificent, wall-to-wall vistas afforded by its open meadows. Painters and early landscape photographers captured what are now emblematic images of the West: broad valleys rimmed by granite cliffs with spilling waterfalls.

Those open valley floors were maintained first by Native Americans who regularly set fires to clear trees, or by blazes sparked by lightning. Travelers in the 19th century grazed their livestock in the Yosemite Valley and planted crops, relegating trees to the edges of the meadows.

When landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted prepared a report on the Yosemite region in 1865, he singled out the deep-cleft valleys for particular praise, calling the sight "the greatest glory of nature."

But the park service moves quickly to stamp out fires that might otherwise thin the stands of trees that spread their seedlings into meadows. Some of those saplings are now towering to 100 feet, spoiling the party for tourists seeking to immortalize their vacation with a postcard backdrop.

Officials here have been thinking about the sightline issue for some time. In 2009, the park analyzed 181 scenic views around Yosemite, excluding wilderness areas. The survey revealed that encroaching vegetation obscured the view at 28% of the sites and partially blocked it at 54% of them.

"We are managing the park for people," said Kevin McCardle, a park service historical architect who headed up the scenic vista team. "We have to create roads, we have to create parking lots, we have to create space for people. We are creating space for visitors to see the park."

Visitors on a recent day seemed mostly unaware of the park's plans to fell trees near meadows, roads and along some lakes — 93 sites in all. Gary Lockhart was striding briskly along a Yosemite Valley trail, carrying a tree limb as a walking stick. He said he hadn't heard of the new policy, but thought it was a good idea.

"I've been coming here since the '50s and I know what this used to look like. You used to be able to see from there," he said, waving his stick to one end of the valley, "to there."

"This valley was wide open," said Lockhart, who lives in Bakersfield. "This place is honeycombed with trails, but you'd never know because of the trees."

Of course, Half Dome, at 8,800 feet, is difficult to miss. But stands of pines gather at one end of a meadow along the Merced River, and at the far end trees clog the view of Yosemite Falls. And in some cases, a full view other well-known scenes may elude amateur photographers, especially as fast-growing conifers continue to fill in.

John Rienzie was resting on log bench, gazing across two lanes of a Yosemite summer traffic jam, enjoying the sight of the late-afternoon sun lingering on the crest of Half Dome. He pondered the policy for some time before saying he would agree "if there is a purpose to it."

After a moment, the New Yorker asked again why it was necessary. To improve the views for visitors, he was told.

He looked up quizzically, "If you can't see that mountain," he said, stabbing a finger at the distant granite wall, "you need to have your glasses checked."